how everything had a name in the tender white light

                                fracturing over our pliant limbs, tangled

           against car seats saturated with smoke,

                            silence calcifying in the negative space of our ribs.

  how the milk-washed moon,

     sunken into the shuttered eye of august heat, stretched

        slow over our fingers like taffy,

                        stripping our nails to crescent flakes of rust.            

    how you tucked a prayer beneath the flap of my cornea

                           as lighting splintered over our sloping shoulders

                   like an impulse of God, and all we could be were bodies,

                                    ephemeral, slack-jaw hunger teething into our spines,

                            dried rinds crushed between our thighs

         like every last confession.

    i ran my hands over the recesses of your flesh

                         like the bare-boned teeth of a key, the worn beads of a rosary

                and we thrashed against the steering wheel, heretical -

                            twin blades of falling shadow, mangled ribbons of warmth -

                                                 like we could slip past our skin,

                                      fold into the maw of night.           

   how i pinned your wings to the furrows of your back,

                                   dug my fingers into your cranium and pulled.

          your head, haloed with brittle black water;

                       your name falling to its knees in my throat,

                                                                                                a prayer.